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Psychology Today
Sept 30, 2016
by Michelle Carr

It’s often thought that when one sensory modality is weakened, the other senses become more attuned to compensate. For example, someone with significant hearing loss may then be more visually sensitive. One recent study set out to investigate whether this sort of compensation might also occur during dreams. Do individuals with hearing loss experience more visual dreams? And what about their hearing, do they struggle with comprehension or confusion even in sleep?

In the past, researchers have compared the dream content of hearing loss vs. hearing individuals with conflicting results. For example, Mendelson, Siger, and Solomon (1960) conducted interviews on dreams with participants with congenital deafness, hearing loss acquired before five years, and hearing loss acquired later. They found that several facets of dream experience were amplified in the congenital hearing loss group, including: dream recall frequency, color, vividness and spatial depth.

Read more  . . . Dreams

 

 
RAWSTORY
VAN WINKLE'S
27 MAY 2016

For certain members of the deaf community, dreams are a rare time when communication is easy.

From solar-powered hearing aids to sign language translation devices, today’s deaf community have many tools and options that make communication much simpler than it once was. Nonetheless, during waking hours, being unable to hear in a world driven by sound remains a significant challenge. Lip reading is more difficult and less accurate than popularly believed. And while the use of American Sign Language (ASL) and cued speech has increased, they are still only used by a small fraction of the U.S. population.

But in some dreams, deaf people find they don’t need lip reading or have to worry whether people know sign language. In many of their dreams, everyone knows ASL or communicates through a sort of telepathy where everyone simply knows instantly what everyone else is trying to say.

Read more  . . . Deaf Dreams